Antsy Does Time

Kjersten who seemed worried, because she knew as well as I did that this was just one battle in a much bigger war. The security guard escorting us must have resented that look on Gunnar’s face, because he was rough with him, and got rougher when Gunnar tried to pull out of his grasp.

“Are you gonna let this rent-a-cop beat me up?”

Mr. Umlaut didn’t look at him. He didn’t say a word until we were off the casino floor, and the security guard returned to his duties, satisfied that we were no longer a threat.

“Proud of yourself, Gunnar?”

“Are you?” Gunnar answered, with such righteous authority that his father couldn’t look him in the eye.

“There are things you don’t understand.”

“I understand a lot more than you think.”

Rather than letting the two of them bicker, Kjersten cut it off. “Daddy,” she said, “we want you to come home.”

He didn’t answer right away. Instead he looked at them, perhaps searching for something in their faces, but you couldn’t read much in those two—in that way, they took after their father.

“Didn’t your mother tell you?” he said.

“What?” said Gunnar. “That you’re splitting up? Of course she did.”

It surprised me that he hadn’t told them himself. Even if they already knew, he had a responsibility to say it in his own words.

“I will let you know where I am, once I know myself,” he said. “There’s nothing to worry about.”

“There’s a lot to worry about,” Gunnar said—then Gunnar got closer to him. All this time he had maintained a distance from his father, like there was an invisible wall around him. Now Gunnar stepped inside that wall. “You’re sick, Dad.” He looked at the casino, all full of whirring, blaring, coin-clanging excitement, then turned back to his father. “You’re very sick. And I think if you don’t do something about it... if you don’t stop gambling, somehow it’s going to kill you.”

But rather than taking it in, Mr. Umlaut seemed to just pull his wall in closer, so Gunnar was on the outside again. “Is that what your mother says?”

“No,” said Kjersten. “We figured it out for ourselves.”

“I appreciate your concern,” he said, like he was talking to strangers instead of his children. “I’ll be fine.”

“What about them?” I said. Maybe I was out of line speaking at all, but I had to say something.

Suddenly I found all his anger turned against me. “What business is this of yours? What do you know about our family? What do you know about anything?”

“Leave him alone!” shouted Kjersten. “At least he’s around when we need him. At least he’s there.” Which I guess is the best you could say about me. “At least he’s not away day after day, gambling away every penny he owns. How much money have you lost, Dad? Then the car—and now the house ...”

“You’re not understanding!” he said, loud enough to snag the attention of another family waiting to check in. They peered at us over their luggage, pretending not to. Mr. Umlaut forced his voice down again. “The car, the house—we were losing them anyway—if not this month, then next month. A few dollars gambled makes no difference.”

I think he truly believed that—and for the first time, I began to understand what Kjersten and Gunnar were up against. Mr. Umlaut had, once upon a time, been a lawyer. That meant he could create a brilliant and convincing argument as to why the hours, days, and weeks spent in a casino were the best possible use of his time. I’m sure if I sat there and let him make his argument, he might even convince me. Juries let guilty men go free all the time.

Then Gunnar dropped the bombshell. It was a bombshell I didn’t even know about.

“Mom’s taking us back to Sweden,” he said. “She’s taking us there for good.”

Although the news shocked me, I have to say I wasn’t surprised. Apparently neither was Mr. Umlaut. He waved his hand as if shooing away a swarm of gnats. “She’s bluffing,” he said. “She’s been saying that forever. She’ll never do it.”

“This time she means it,” Kjersten said. “She has airplane tickets for all of us,” and then she added, “All of us but you.”

This hit Mr. Umlaut harder than anything else that had been said today. He looked at them, then looked at me as if I was somehow the mastermind of some conspiracy against him. He went away in his own head for a few moments. I could almost hear the conversation he was having with himself. Finally he spoke with the kind of conviction we had all been hoping to hear.

“She can’t do that.” He shook his head. “She can’t legally do that. She can’t just take you from the country without my permission!”

We all waited for him to make that momentous decision to DO something. Anything. This is what Gunnar and Kjersten wanted. Sure, it wasn’t reconciliation between their parents, but it was the next best thing—they wanted their father to see what he was losing, and finally choose to do something about it.

I felt sure Gunnar and Kjersten had finally broken through that wall. Until Mr. Umlaut released a long, slow sigh.

“Perhaps it’s all for the best,” he said. “Have your mother call me. I’ll sign all the necessary papers.”

And it was over. Just like that, it was over.

***

There are some things I don’t understand, and don’t think I ever will. I don’t understand how a person can give up so totally and completely that they dive right into the heart of a black hole. I can’t understand how someone’s need to gamble, or to drink, or to shoot up, or to do anything can be greater than their need to survive. And I don’t understand how pride can be more important than love.

“Our father’s a proud man,” Kjersten said as we drove away from the casino—as if pride can be an excuse for acting so shamefully—and yes, I know the man was sick, just as Gunnar said, but that didn’t excuse the choice he made today.

I felt partially to blame, because I was the one who convinced Gunnar and Kjersten to come. I honestly believed it would make a difference. Like I said, I come from a family of fixers—but what happens when something simply can’t be fixed?

I thought about my own father, fighting for his life, and winning, even as Mr. Umlaut threw his life away, surrendering—and it occurred to me how a roll of the dice had given me back my father, and had taken theirs away.

The day was bright and sunny as we drove home, Gunnar in the back, me shotgun beside Kjersten. I wished it wasn’t such a nice day out. I wished it was raining, because the mind-numbing sound of the windshield wipers swiping back and forth would have been better than the silence, or all the false emotions of the radio, which had been on for a whole minute before Kjersten turned it off. Kjersten looked a little tired, a little grateful, and a little embarrassed that I had seen their seedy family moment. It made driving home now all the more awkward.

A lot of things made more and more sense now. Gunnar’s illness, for one. I wondered when he first began suspecting they might move out of the country. But being sick—that would change everything, wouldn’t it? It could keep his parents together—force his father to spend money on treatment instead of gambling it away. And since the best treatment was right here in New York, no one would be going anywhere. If I were Gunnar, I might wish I had Pulmonary Monoxic Systemia, too. Because the sickness of the son might cure the sickness of the father.

I held off filling our driving silence as long as I could, but there’s only so long you can resist your own nature.

“I had this friend once,” I told them. “Funny kind of kid. The thing is, his mom abandoned him in a shopping cart when he was five—and his dad treated him like he didn’t even exist...”

“So, do all your friends have screwed-up families?” Gunnar asked.

“Yeah, I’m like flypaper for dysfunction. Anyway, he had it rough for a while, did some really stupid things— but in the end he turned out okay. He even tracked down his mom.”

“And they lived happily ever after?” said Gunnar.

“Well, last I heard, they both disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle—but for them that was normal.”

“I think what Antsy’s saying,” said Kjersten, sounding a little more relaxed than she did before, “is that we’re